We are big fans of citizen science! Of course, science is always cool, and STEM/STEAM projects are an increasing part of everyone’s work and school experiences. So understanding how science works is not just fun, but a good way to understand what is going on in the world around us all.
So we are sharing some neat science you can do, contributing toward large projects, and learning new things. Maybe you can use this today; maybe you will save it for later. As long as you enjoy some exploration and learning new things – citizen science is for you! And it is definitely something you can use to bring some good programming to your library.
Check out this project from SciStarter:
| Presented By | ScienceAtHome, Aarhus University |
|---|---|
| Goal | Study human problem-solving |
| Task | Solve complex problems by intuition |
| Where | Online |
| Description | Computers are getting smarter and smarter every day. A computer can tell you which exit to take off the highway or what kind of books to read. The one thing computers can’t do (yet) is to solve complex problems. And problem-solving is vital for business AND for building better computers! “When you play a game—if you learn to be good at it—you find what it is you should have been thinking about.” John Conway It is the ability of learning and “finding out” that makes humans much better than computers to learn how to solve complex problems. These days, getting people from diverse backgrounds to help us solve problems is on the rise. Several universities and private organizations around the world are tapping into the knowledge of people like you. Because this usually involves a large number of people (i.e. crowds) It is frequently referred to as crowdsourcing. This is unexpected since usually organizations rely on their internal experts to solve the problems. The key insight here is that non-expert humans can have vital input or to put it differently, they can think outside the box since they are not fixated by experience. However, we still know surprisingly little about the strategies that humans use, to learn how to solve a new problem. If we know the nature of the problem, obviously it is just about getting from A to B in a straight line. But how do people cope with not having (enough) information about where B, i.e. the goal, is? One of the most intuitive metaphors in problem-solving put forward by the pioneer of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, Simon Herbert, illuminates the issue: Simon likened problem-solving with a search through a landscape with a hidden treasure (Simon 1983). You don’t know where the treasure is but each move gives you a bit more information and allows you to make decisions about where to move next. If it is a very easy problem you can easily skip from location to location, quickly getting better and better and making your way towards the final goal (more or less following the A-B straight line, even if you don’t know where B is!). However, for more complex problems, this might not be the optimal strategy, because you will get ambiguous feedback. What do we mean by ambiguous feedback? There’s an old story of three blind men and an elephant. Each of them touches a different part of the elephant and reaches wildly different conclusions: it’s a brush, a pillar or a plow. Before you laugh, think about this: It’s not trivial when you touch something that resembles a brush to figure out that you are dealing with the tip of the tail of an elephant! Still, despite decades of research, we lack a proper understanding of how humans go about solving problems and we could use your help. In the end, by solving the complex Alien CODE, you can help us solve a complex problem! See less |
| How to get started | Visit our website to play the game online! |
| Social Media | Follow Alien CODE on Twitter Find Alien CODE on Facebook Follow the Alien CODE |
| How-To Video | Check out the how-to video |
| Total expense | 0.00 |
| Ideal Age Group | College, High school (14 – 17 years), Seniors, Adults, Graduate students, Families, |
| Ideal Frequency | Unspecified |
| Average Time | One minute |
| Type of Activity | At home, At night, At school, Exclusively online, |
| Topics | Psychology, Social Science, Physics, |
| Tags | alien game, complex problems, human, intuition, problem-solving, |
| Website | Alien CODE |
And if you want to bring in a few of these ideas to your library, it is useful to have a variety of different program strategies to help share this project. We have a few suggestions to help you get started:
- Do some basic coding; find a website like Scratch to help learn new coding strategies
- What kind of video games do you like? Write up a short essay about a game that doesn’t exist yet, but you would like to play.
- Find a list of books about treasure hunting; read a couple that looks the most interesting
- Find a video of the largest crowd that exist; what event was it?